Yep -- it's true, unless Mr. Bassett started something in the last 5 months. Doubtful, because he hasn't even provided classroom instruction and training for some of the people now crewing his trains. Back when Jason Lamb was RFE and we had Chris, Jarrod, Jeremy, Greg, and Dave (and later Marty) in the shop, we were really moving to professional standards and improving operations. A lot of the efforts made were to bring us into compliance with FRA. NNRy hasn't adopted GCOR, opting instead to write their own rulebook each year. This is allowed, but whatever is written is considered the rule of law. Unfortunately, one of the new rules was drug testing (pre-employment, random and post-incident), but Mr. Bassett never followed through with implementation. He initially told everyone they'd have to pay for it on their own, but when he got pushback he just let the issue go unresolved. When we questioned him about it, he said he didn't have the money. We referred him to the appropriate CFR sections about civil penalties and how lack of funding is no excuse for non-compliance, but he ignored it. We advised the Board of the civil penalties for wilfull violation, but they also chose to ignore it. Of course, drug testing is only one of many of their own rules they've chosen to ignore. Track worker safety training, operating crew qualifications,
and track maintenance plan and documentation are just a few. Pretty sad...